If you need to take a step back from day-to-day operations and plot out the long-term direction of your user experience strategy, consultants can give you a perspective you can't get on your own.
It's not the consumers' job to figure out what they want
User-centered design means understanding what your users need, how they think, and how they behave - and incorporating that understanding into every aspect of your process.
Well, the whole story is in the book, but the short answer is that I was the first information architect in an organization that was traditionally design-oriented, and I felt I needed a tool to help me gain the trust and support of my colleagues.
We don't do focus groups - that is the job of the designer. It's unfair to ask people who don't have a sense of the opportunities of tomorrow from the context of today to design.
The best design work is really done when you spend more time with people, when you have the opportunity to be of the same mindset and the same incentives as the founder of the business.
User experience is everything. It always has been, but it's undervalued and underinvested in. If you don't know user-centered design, study it. Hire people who know it. Obsess over it. Live and breathe it. Get your whole company on board.
We struggle with the right words to describe the design process at Apple. But it is very much about designing and prototyping and making.
We sent our user research team out to sit with customers for periods of time and get some insight into how Slack is working. We also get tens of thousands of points of contact via Twitter and our customer support ticketing system every month and can synthesize those results.
I was a user experience designer for Google Docs.
User-centered design means working with your users all throughout the project.
We need to reengineer companies to focus on figuring out who the customer is, what's the market and what kind of product you should build.
To me, 'design thinking' is another way of saying empathize with the customer. It's consideration for the person you're designing for.
Business owners should think of designers as architects, not decorators.
In software, it's easy to understand what people want, and it's hard to build. Internet stuff is super easy to build, but it's hard to know what people want.
Who would you talk to? That is the first question for almost any startup that you need to answer. Who is my user and where am I going to find them?
Watching how customers actually use a product provides much more reliable information than can be gleaned from a verbal interview or a focus group.
For Customer Development to succeed, everyone on the team - from investor or parent company to engineers, marketers and founders - needs to understand and agree that the Customer Development process is different to its core.
One thing that probably is unique at Activision is that we really spend a lot of time up front with our audiences, and in big quantities and with a very thoughtful process, to really try and draw out from them what it is that they would like to play. So we have a pretty good sense going in what the expectation of the audience is.
The office is the laboratory and meeting your users is like going into the field. You can't just stay in the lab. And it's not just asking users what they want, it's about seeing what they're doing.
Companies in Silicon Valley invest a lot in understanding their users and what drives user engagement.
We're always doing a lot of user studies on health and safety. We take it super seriously. But if you look back at the history of most new big technology breakthroughs, there is some element of controversy around what impact is it going to have.
We don't do focus groups - that is the job of the designer.
Most people who are on the inside of a technology have no idea what it's like to look at from an end user's point of view. This is why they have focus groups. I'm really familiar with this because I worked 10 years for Hallmark Cards in the U.S.
You have to know what your users are experiencing.
